Ars reviews the Palm Pre, part 2: the webOS experience

In this second installment of our Palm Pre review, we go in-depth on the …

Links, queries, and the webOS address book

Pre's address book may be a superior way to wrangle the torrent of contact data that the cloud deluges us with, but its approach isn't without a downside. In particular, webOS's problem isn't with the "query" part of the paradigm, but with the "collect" part. And most importantly for Palm, the problems I'm going to outline below are inherent in the approach that Palm has chosen, which means it's going to require some real problem-solving to get around them.

First, let's talk about the webOS concept of "links." It's easier to show you an example of links than to explain it, so below is the address book entry for my good friend Taylor Guillory, aka Mr. Britches on Facebook.

I connect with Taylor via email, IM, and Facebook, and the Pre has profiles for all three accounts in the entry above. On Facebook, however, Taylor doesn't use his real name; he just goes by "Mr. Britches" in his profile. Furthermore, neither of the email addresses that I have for him in my Google Contacts database match the address that his Facebook profile has. Yet, somehow, after collecting contact info for Taylor from both Google and Facebook, Pre has figured out that these two profiles belong to the same person, and has linked them together into a single address book entry.

If Taylor had another email address lurking somewhere in that list of 450 contacts on my phone, I could press the "Link more profiles" button, find the new address, and manually link it to his main profile.

Now, there are two problems with the links that Taylor's profile illustrates, a problem with the auto-generated links and a problem with the manual ones.

Profile link problems

First, the auto-generated links: I'm not entirely sure how Pre did this, nor am I sure why it did not make this same connection the first time I loaded up my initial review unit (the one that broke) with these same contacts. On that first Pre, Taylor and Mr. Britches were two separate entries with no automatic link between them.

And here's another mystery: webOS erroneously linked my profile with that of a random friend of mine, even though we have no contact info in common. After removing my Google account from the phone and doing a bunch of random mucking about with and pruning of my Google Contacts database, it did not make this erroneous link a second time when I put the Google account back in.

So the problem with the auto-generation of profile links is that it's not always 100 percent accurate, and the way in which it makes its determinations about what goes with what isn't apparent to or under the control of the end user. So when I searched for my friend Alan and my own profile came up, with his email address and number added to it, I had no idea what the Pre was thinking. But I know what I was thinking, and it was "welcome to the world of collect-and-query, where you take the search results that the computer gives you, and they're not always perfect."

Now for the problem with manually linking profiles: there's no way to save these links outside of the device, since Palm Profiles doesn't appear to back them up. So if I invest a bunch of time in making links between different profiles, and then my Pre breaks (as my first one did), I'll lose all of that effort.

It's possible that Palm has a plan to remedy this by backing up the links so that they persist across devices, but it's hard to square that idea with the concept of a purely service-based contact list that's essentially a list of live query results.

You can't back up links between query results without also backing up the results, so the idea that Palm Profiles will store the links between address book profiles necessarily presumes that Palm will also store some copy or representation (a hash?) of the linked contact entries. Palm may indeed opt to go this route, but the company will have to be careful to navigate any privacy issues arising from the fact that it's caching representations of a subset of some third-party service's contact data.

In conclusion, webOS's profile links are a hack that lets Palm implement federated search in a manner that's intended to reduce the amount of post-query browsing and sorting of results that the user must do. In this respect, Palm is trying to have it both ways—links are intended to add structure to the data that the device has cached from your services, but only just a little bit, and only once (you hope). So the links are a concession to the fact that queries run against unstructured data that doesn't always surface the desired record first.

Final thoughts on the address books

So where does all of this abstract discussion of paradigms and links and queries leave the Palm Pre? Well, I'll tell you where it left me. I spent about 45 minutes one evening consolidating all of my contact info into Google Contacts, and then pruning and merging the resulting database so that the Pre would be less confused by it. And I'm still not done deleting old email addresses that Gmail has saved.

Even so, I still much prefer Pre's approach to contact management. I'd rather spend my time massaging a massive dataset so that it generates better query results than manually organizing a much smaller one for rapid browsability. It's also the case that services like Facebook, Google Contacts, Exchange, etc. might one day become aware that they're being used in a federated fashion, and find ways to include explicit support for such use.